Ten editors.
Zero readers.
The Mac has had ten good markdown editors for a decade. It has never had a markdown reader. Sigla is the reader.
Every markdown app on this platform is an editor.
iA Writer, Typora, MacDown, Bear, Obsidian, VS Code, Nova, BBEdit — each a place to write. The closest thing to a reader was a preview pane bolted to an editor, or Marked 2 watching a file from across the desktop. Reading never got its own application; it lived as a sub-feature inside whatever held the cursor.
That made sense when the documents you cared about were the ones you were writing. It does not make sense now.
Long-form prose got cheap. Reading didn't.
There's more structured technical writing than ever — RFCs, design docs, postmortems, runbooks, LLM output — and more of it lands on you.
The editor stack didn't change to meet it. Reading a 6,000-word design doc inside an editor means a tool tuned for the opposite act — caret blinking, syntax highlighting your prose like source code, nowhere to put a thought that won't get committed to the file.
Reading is active work. The tool should treat it that way.
A reader has to render every format the document contains — Mermaid, PlantUML, Vega-Lite, math, code, frontmatter — and check the cross-links resolve. Broken links and missing diagrams are debt the reader pays; Sigla flags them inline as you read.
A reader has to let you write in the margins. Not in a side channel, not in a chat thread, not in a notes app you'll forget about. Where the paragraph is.
And once you've read and written in the margins, a reader has to hand the whole package — source, annotations, questions — to whichever model will help you answer them. That last step, exporting questions plus source as a prompt, is the one nothing else does.
Three things Sigla won't become.
Sigla is not a markdown editor. It will never grow a caret. The source files you open in it stay untouched by the act of reading them — your team's editor still owns the write path. Open Sigla, read, mark it up; commit from whatever you commit from.
Sigla is not a knowledge base. Obsidian, Logseq, and Notion are tools for the documents you wrote and want to retrieve later. Sigla is for the documents someone else wrote and you have to understand now. Different jobs, different shapes.
Sigla is not a collaboration tool. The annotations you add stay local to your machine in a sidecar file next to the source — no server, no shared cursors, no presence. If you want to share what you found, you export — to a prompt, to a copied passage, to a screenshot.
It reads like macOS.
Sigla is a native AppKit application — system fonts, system shortcuts; ⌘F, ⌘+, ⌘0, Find Next all behave the way they do everywhere else on the platform. It launches in under a second. It doesn't bundle a browser to render markdown. It's the kind of small, fast, native Mac app that used to be the norm.
That choice is part of the product, not an implementation detail.